mm: thrash detection-based file cache sizing

mm: thrash detection-based file cache sizing

The VM maintains cached filesystem pages on two types of lists.  One
list holds the pages recently faulted into the cache, the other list
holds pages that have been referenced repeatedly on that first list.
The idea is to prefer reclaiming young pages over those that have shown
to benefit from caching in the past.  We call the recently usedbut
ultimately was not significantly better than a FIFO policy and still
thrashed cache based on eviction speed, rather than actual demand for
cache.

This patch solves one half of the problem by decoupling the ability to
detect working set changes from the inactive list size.  By maintaining
a history of recently evicted file pages it can detect frequently used
pages with an arbitrarily small inactive list size, and subsequently
apply pressure on the active list based on actual demand for cache, not
just overall eviction speed.

Every zone maintains a counter that tracks inactive list aging speed.
When a page is evicted, a snapshot of this counter is stored in the
now-empty page cache radix tree slot.  On refault, the minimum access
distance of the page can be assessed, to evaluate whether the page
should be part of the active list or not.

This fixes the VM's blindness towards working set changes in excess of
the inactive list.  And it's the foundation to further improve the
protection ability and reduce the minimum inactive list size of 50%.

Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Minchan Kim <[email protected]>
Reviewed-by: Bob Liu <[email protected]>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <[email protected]>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <[email protected]>
Cc: Dave Chinner <[email protected]>
Cc: Greg Thelen <[email protected]>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <[email protected]>
Cc: Jan Kara <[email protected]>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <[email protected]>
Cc: Luigi Semenzato <[email protected]>
Cc: Mel Gorman <[email protected]>
Cc: Metin Doslu <[email protected]>
Cc: Michel Lespinasse <[email protected]>
Cc: Ozgun Erdogan <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Cc: Roman Gushchin <[email protected]>
Cc: Ryan Mallon <[email protected]>
Cc: Tejun Heo <[email protected]>
Cc: Vlastimil Babka <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>